Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  He felt a tug at his shoulder. Corporal Benson was crouching in the aisle. “Sir, you’ve been sitting here for seven hours. The manager doesn’t know what to do. The projectionist is gone. The house is empty. You sat right past the last show. But you’re the grand pasha at the Tivoli. They could never have had July Garland and Margaret O’Brien without you, sir.”

  “Corporal, I was ruminating,” Sonny said. “I’m always refreshed after a long sit in the dark.” He had a sudden flash of boys with dark blue skin being raked out of the water with a huge fishing net.

  He scampered out of his seat and followed Corporal Benson up the aisle with a pronounced limp, just like the Royal Whisperer, another lad with a peg leg.

  PART TWO

  The Far Shore

  June 1944

  1.

  HE LEAPT OUT OF THE LANDING CRAFT into a wallop of water, flailing a bit, like a bat lost in a storm. Sonny had a life preserver that was almost a strangulation cord, plus a combat pack on his shoulders that pounded as the water pounded. He couldn’t afford to get his manuscripts wet. He had the melody of words inside his skull as he could hear the terrible whine of bullets all around him. A dogface fell and disappeared into the undertow, then resurfaced with one of his fingers shorn off. Despite that rush of blood, there was a calm that Sonny hadn’t anticipated. Utah seemed half-deserted, with ripples of barbed wire and steel spikes in the sand. Sonny hadn’t arrived with the first assault wave, but the second. Nor had he arrived with his own regiment. The CIC had come to reconnoiter, to act as scouts and interrogate any captured collaborators, but there were no collaborators on Uncle Red, Utah’s remote southern sector.

  Frogmen were already on the beach, dismantling trip mines and the explosives attached to concrete barriers—triangular pyramids that cluttered the sand. Amphibious tanks shed their canvas skirts that had helped keep them afloat. They ripped through the wire and battered the masonry seawall that extended right across Uncle Red. These “swim tanks” had come dancing out of the water from the bellies of their mother ships. There was hardly a pillbox to be found in this peaceful patch of Utah, and the Shermans crushed whatever pillboxes and machine-gun nests were still alive, though they couldn’t completely dislodge the Krauts from their concrete encasements along the dunes.

  Most of the calm around Sonny had come from a miscue. The combat mission’s control boat had led its landing crafts astray; washed south by the currents, the first and second assault teams had rushed through the water almost a mile from their planned destination, onto a beach that still had some “incoming mail” from Kraut artillery in the dunes and a whole lot of “outgoing mail” from B-26 Marauders that flew sortie after sortie over the Kraut tunnels and bunkers, leaving an epic cloud of dust and smoke in their wake.

  Uncle Red was cleared within an hour. Dogfaces, frogmen, and boys from the CIC could have been on their own private lagoon, accompanied by the constant grind of amphibious tanks, rain whipping into their faces from the force of the wind, and the distant illumination of their own destroyers—lightning bolts that hovered over the water.

  Standing near the shoreline, directing traffic in that haze of dust and smoke, was Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., deputy commander of the Fourth Division, and the lone general who’d arrived with the first wave. At fifty-six, he was the oldest boy on the beach. Wounded in the First War, he had to hop about with a cane. The sand kept shifting around him, as if he’d stepped out of a mirage, like a magnificent toad in his goggles.

  He had a pinched face, and his helmet seemed much too large for his head. He seemed aware that Sonny was with the CIC.

  “Well, we don’t have too many captured Krauts for you to interrogate. Carry on, Mr. Salinger. We have to clear off Uncle Red. Our paratroopers landed in the middle of the night. Those boys are stuck in the interior. We have to find them before they get scalped.”

  And the general went back into the haze.

  Sonny felt stranded for a moment, like a beachcomber in the midst of battle. Then he recognized Corporal Benson and Captain Blunt, who’d arrived on the same landing craft with several other CIC agents, but without his swagger stick. It must have disappeared in the undertow.

  “Sarge, we made it, Sarge,” the corporal gloated. “I could kiss the ground. We made it to Normandy. It was a piece of cake.”

  “Quiet,” Sonny said, “before you get your ass blown off.”

  He could no longer tell if Blunt was their commander or not; that’s how mysterious—and fluid—everything was in the CIC. Blunt had lost that crack discipline to lead a cadre of agents. His eyes bulged within the sockets of his skeletal face. Blunt no longer had his bearings. Sonny had to grab him by the elbow. “This way, sir.”

  “Don’t touch me,” the captain spat like an asp. “I don’t like to be touched. Who the heck are you, anyway?”

  “One of your own, sir. Sergeant Salinger. We’re still attached to the Twelfth.”

  The captain muttered to himself. His combat boots seemed stuck in the sand, as if he were moving across an endless slab of wet concrete. Sonny didn’t have much of a choice. He had to drag his own captain along the dunes.

  “Sarge,” the corporal whispered, “we could leave him here. The medics will find him.”

  “Shut up,” Sonny said. “Cap belongs with us.”

  The corporal pounded his chest. “He’s no captain. Look at him! He’s a loony. Leave him here.”

  “Corporal,” Sonny said, “if you’re derelict, I’ll leave you behind. And you’ll become like one of the ghosts we caught on Slapton Sands. Help me, dammit!”

  And so they dragged him along until they found the scattered bits of their own regiment, boys who had arrived on the beach long after the first and second wave and weren’t really comfortable around the CIC. The lieutenant in charge of the nearest rifle platoon looked at Sonny askance. But Sonny had established his own relation to the Fourth while he’d been at Tiverton Castle.

  “We have to get off these dunes, sir. There are mines near the machine-gun nests. We’re still too much of a target.”

  “And go where?” the lieutenant asked. Sonny could tell from the glaze in his eyes that this was no civilian soldier swallowed up in the draft. First Lieutenant Thomas Oliver III had graduated from the Military College of South Carolina, otherwise known as the Citadel. He was a “squirrel shooter”—a southern boy with hollow cheeks and clipped blond hair. He couldn’t hide his disdain of the CIC. “Sergeant, can’t you tell? The Krauts have flooded the marshlands and left us with one open causeway. We’ll have every sniper in the area on our tail if we walk that line…. And who’s this skull you brought along for the ride?”

  “Our commander,” Sonny said.

  “Commander of what?”

  “Counter Intelligence, Fourth Division.”

  “Unbelievable,” the first lieutenant muttered, slapping the pistol butt at his side. “Don’t you masterminds at CIC have any human beings?”

  Blunt woke from his torpor. His body stiffened. He didn’t need Sonny’s support. “Lieutenant, you’ll order your men to wade through that marsh.”

  Lieutenant Oliver saluted the walking skeleton. “Yes, sir. Sorry I insulted you, sir.”

  And the Twelfth persevered. The minute the dogfaces approached that one available exit off the dunes, they had Screaming Meemies in their ears—Nebelwerfer, mortar rockets that arrived with a relentless wail. Sonny didn’t dare fasten the chin straps of his helmet. The force of a Screaming Meemie could rip his neck off under a fastened strap. Yet no war games in the world could have prepared him for that sound—it clung to you like a banshee, bit into your bones. The dunes quaked under him with each deafening whistle of a Meemie. The dogfaces ran toward that strange lagoon, wider than a mile. And now Sonny realized why Slapton Sands had been chosen for Exercise Tiger; it had its own rough terrain, its own lagoon—Slapton Ley. But this flooded farmland was much more insidious than a still-water lake in South Devon. It was no country creek—it had been bulldoze
d and mined and strung from end to end with trip wire as sharp as a razor. Some of the boys had tossed away their life preservers once they crossed the seawall. They hadn’t expected an artificial lake on the far side of Uncle Red. You could move along in three feet of brackish water and then fall into a hole ten feet high. And then there was a diving expedition to pull that dogface out of the deep. Still, several dogfaces drowned, lost in that infernal web of wire.

  Sonny was vigilant; Sonny maneuvered, as if he were reading a map with each step he took. The corporal, he realized, could take care of himself. But Blunt drifted in and out of a dream. And Sonny felt responsible for this ruthless captain who might have been relieved of his command while they were in the midst of crossing the Channel. It didn’t seem to matter now. The CIC was suddenly like some forgotten nimbus. They were all dogfaces on this lagoon that Kraut demolition engineers might have flooded with inflammable material. But Sonny didn’t see any fires on the lake, not one rifleman lit up like a burning tree. Still, he held up Blunt by the straps of his battle gear.

  “Let go of me,” the captain said. “I can walk. I’m not an infant.”

  And then Blunt would sink under the surface, and Sonny had to pull and pull to bring him back, while sniper bullets created ripples all across the lake, or spun a rifleman around and left him to lie in this wet German cradle.

  There was no reprieve, not a second to reconnoiter and taste the wind. They had to cross this lagoon, or fall back onto Uncle Red. Sonny peed in his pants. They all did. And while they waded, with wires ripping into their combat boots, the Meemies wailed. And when a Meemie crashed into the water, starting up a minor hurricane, with dogfaces flying into the air like rag dolls, every sort of paraphernalia struck the water—helmets, Hershey bars, and human limbs. Sonny had a crushing vertigo, as the limbs floated past him like little barks, buoyed by the currents and the salt in the lake. The Krauts wanted to leave them stranded in this flood, finish this assault on the first day. Their lagoon seemed to have its own infernal horizon, as if it commanded the whole of Normandy.

  First Lieutenant Oliver, twenty-three years old and fresh out of the Citadel, barked at his platoon, more of a soldier than Sonny would ever be. Sonny wanted to survive, not carve his name into the Norman coast as the daredevil of occupied France.

  “Move along, Private. You’re floundering. The Krauts would love to catch us bare-assed in their little sea…. Sergeant Salinger, you can’t hold on to that skull of a captain forever, even if he is with Counter Intel.”

  Sonny didn’t want to contradict this southern cowboy from the Citadel.

  “We’ll need him, sir, once we’re out of this morass. He’s a fucker when it comes to interrogating saboteurs.”

  “Salinger, do you see any saboteurs on this lake?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then drop him, son. That’s an order.”

  Sonny continued to clutch Captain Blunt by his straps.

  “Did you hear me, Salinger?”

  “I did, sir. But I’m CIC.”

  The lieutenant cursed and waded over to his captain. They whispered in the water. Then the lieutenant returned.

  “We’ll settle this some other time, Salinger. But you’re on my shit list, remember that.”

  “I will, sir.”

  His feet were feeling numb, despite the razor cuts in his boots. They had to cross this flooded farmland, cross it as fast as they could. But they were like ducks in a pond, catching sniper fire. The Krauts were hiding somewhere, away from the marsh. It took three hours to cross, maybe even five. There was no such creature as dry land. And then it all stopped, as weirdly as it began. The wetlands turned to stone. They’d come to a tiny village called Sainte-Mère-Ménilmontant, or something close to that. It hardly deserved to be on a map, with its fifty inhabitants, until the Krauts arrived and turned Sainte-Mère into a little camp for their Soldaten who occupied the bunkers and machine-gun nests of Hitler’s fabled Atlantic Wall. That wall seemed very sparse. Sonny had found little else but abandoned bunkers and a few machine-gun nests on Uncle Red.

  Sainte-Mère might have been near a drop zone for the Eighty-second Airborne. But Sonny didn’t see a single sign of paratroopers, not one spot of blood on the cobblestones, nor one bullet hole, nothing except a church with a crooked spire.

  Lieutenant Oliver was prepared to storm the village and occupy every house and garden.

  “Sorry, sir,” Sonny said. “You’ll have to wait here until we have a long look.”

  “That’s preposterous,” the lieutenant said. “I won’t stand for it.”

  “You will,” Sonny said. “It’s our priority—CIC.”

  “Then what are my boys supposed to do?”

  “Camp on the cobblestones—until we tour the village.”

  Sainte-Mère had a single tarred and cobbled street that traveled down a slope from one end of the village to the other. It had a bakery with pretzels in the window, a butcher shop laden with a variety of smoked sausages, a church with Nazi banners flying from its crooked spire, and several brick and stone houses with swastikas pinned to the garden walls. There was also an unmanned guardhouse and antiaircraft gun. The Krauts had fled this village. Only one of the houses, the most luxurious, with bright yellow awnings and a metal gate, was occupied. The Krauts had left their chief clerk and paymaster behind. He wasn’t a military man. He’d been a grocer in civilian life—Hans Schloss. Corporal Benson and Sonny were puzzled by his role as the little king of a fake Tyrolean village in occupied France. But Captain Blunt wasn’t puzzled at all.

  After the paymaster introduced himself and offered everyone some schnapps, Blunt seized him by the collar and slapped his face.

  “Herr Schloss, why are you still here?” Blunt asked in the melodious German of a stage actor. Sonny would have stumbled along in any interrogation, wouldn’t have found the right mode of attack.

  The grocer insisted on answering Blunt in English.

  “What value would I have? Only another mouth to feed.”

  “But I’m not sure I care about your little welcoming committee,” Blunt told him. “What happened to the Eighty-second?”

  The grocer squinted. “I don’t understand you, Herr Kapitän?”

  “The paratroopers,” Blunt said. “They must have come here. There must have been a struggle.”

  “Ah,” the grocer said. “The sky soldiers. They landed in another village, not far from us.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Herr Schloss, “all the silk…. Have some schnapps.”

  Blunt sniffed the schnapps without drinking it and dragged the grocer out of his little dream castle. They broke into another stone castle and the captain tried to shove Herr Schloss into a little closet with a toilet seat.

  “No, Herr Kapitän, I do not have to move my bowels.”

  “Sit, I said.”

  The little grocer turned very pale. “I cannot, Mein Herr. We would all explode.”

  Blunt smiled for the first time Sonny could remember. “Ah, now the fun begins. How much of this toy town is booby-trapped?”

  “All of it,” the grocer said with a triumphant smirk.

  Blunt should have been pleased, but he wasn’t. “And still they left you behind. They knew you would suffer once we discovered your tricks. You could have run, and yet you stayed. Why?”

  The grocer puffed out his chest. “They needed a Schauspieler, or it wouldn’t have worked.”

  “And they elected you,” Blunt said.

  “Of course. I am a civilian—a paymaster. And civilians cannot be shot.”

  Blunt slapped him again. “Where are your German friends, the ones who disappeared from their bunkers on Utah Beach like invisible men and mined this town?”

  “I have no knowledge of this, Herr Kapitäin. Why would they inform a clerk?”

  “Ah, but if I tell my colonel that you’re a captain in the SS, he’ll make you sit on that toilet seat … or shoot you in the head.”


  “But that would be a lie,” the grocer said with the same smirk. “I am not with the SS.”

  “Well, suppose I lie.”

  “Your superiors, they would not believe you.”

  Blunt turned to Sonny. “Sergeant, how long would it take you to produce forged documents that would give Herr Schloss the status of an SS captain?”

  “An hour, sir,” Sonny said, “with a proper lamp.”

  It was another lie, of course. He didn’t have the materials.

  “You are insane,” the grocer said. “All of you.”

  “Herr Schloss,” Blunt said, “where are your German friends?”

  “In the bocage,” the grocer said. “Waiting for you.”

  It was Norman country, with field after field of hedgerows at the bottom of the village. These hedgerows were practically impenetrable—walls of earth and stone, held together by twisted roots that had been there for centuries. They could be seven feet tall, with Kraut machine gunners hiding behind each hedge.